If you’re a longtime fan of Doonesbury, you may remember
when Duke was appointed governor of Samoa. Upon his arrival, he met his new
aide, MacArthur. The aide acknowledged he was named after the general. In fact,
his parents named both their children after the general. Duke thought it was a wonderful
way to honor the great hero. The aide replied that his sister, Doug, didn’t
agree.
My mother, Marilee, was named after a general, also, but she
was proud of it. The general was Robert E. Lee. Marilee’s grandfather, Harrison
Monroe Strickler, served with E Company, 35th Virginia Cavalry. As
the story goes, there was a dangerous nighttime crossing of a river. Because
Lee ordered flares sent up, the troops were saved. The situation must have been
serious enough that Harrison credited Lee with saving his life, and what better
way to honor the general than to name his granddaughter after him.
Harrison must have had life-changing experiences during the
war. He turned twenty at Gettysburg. His outfit is credited with killing the
first Yankees, several days before the big battle. He was with Lee at
Appomattox Courthouse. He didn’t surrender. He rode home to Luray. For the next
forty years, he traveled as a circuit preacher.
When WWI broke out, Harrison’s son Thomas quit high school
and joined the Navy. After training in signals at Harvard, he went to sea. I
always though it odd that I had a grandfather and a great-grandfather, both
about the same age, that were WWI veterans. Harrison’s first wife died and he
remarried. His second wife was a much younger woman. Thomas was born around the
turn of the century. Thomas’s mother died in the early 1950s, which was a
hundred and ten years after her husband was born.
A few years after the war, Thomas graduated from law school
in St. Paul, where he met my grandmother. From what I’ve gathered, the twenties
did roar for the two of them. Thomas played polo at Fort Snelling. He sang in
the civic opera. My grandmother told me about driving to San Antonio in winter
in a Stutz Bearcat, wrapped in buffalo robes. Thomas wanted to fly, not
practice law. At Kelly Field, they met Charles Lindbergh, the shyest man my
grandmother ever knew. She told me the speakeasies in St. Paul were hidden, but
sported neon in Chicago. They had two children.
When Marilee was five or six, she thought it would be cool
to earn some money. She charged all her friends a dime to ride in her father’s
airplane, a two-seater Curtis Jenny. I’m guessing it was summer because she
always said that you didn’t know what cold was until you flew to Minot in
winter in an open-cockpit airplane.
Understanding her father could only take up one passenger at
a time, she set her mind on the problem. The solution was graham crackers. Her
friends could eat graham crackers while waiting for a turn. The idea was sound,
but the temptation too great. When my grandmother learned of the plot, the
graham crackers and the dimes my mother collected were history.
The stock market wasn’t the only crash that ended the
roaring twenties. Thomas crashed and burned in a blizzard near Miles City. He
was thirty years old.
